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Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Sit-down Comedy

I am one of six, not that there are six of me, that would have been unbearable. Seriously, who can imagine sharing a roof with six of me, all bossing each other around and always being right. Instead, I have five siblings, and thankfully I'm the only boss.

As one can imagine, in such a large household, there is bound to be some drama, but there is also a lot of silliness and laughter. Add to the mix a father who is constantly coming up with his own dad-like jokes and you have my family.

I like to think that I inherited my dad's silly sarcasm. One of my brother-in-law's calls me a liar, but to me it's humour. I merely give silly questions absurd replies, if he believes me, well then he just doesn't get it.

Inevitably I married someone who shares the same humour, oh and he's also always right too. I am however, still the boss. Besides the humour, we also share a love of film-making, which is how we met to start with. Fast forward nine years and we have now become writing partners.

Since the end of last year we have been writing comedy. This is all very new and strange to me as until that point I considered myself a drama writer and had never even thought of writing comedy. I could never imagine myself as a stand up comedian, I'm more of a sit-down comedian. My mind is too slow to come up with quick witty comments and comebacks, but with a pen in hand, no pressure to perform, it seems to come out; at least I laugh at my jokes, so that's one person.

We first started to write a sitcom purely because of the BBC writersroom Laughing Stock competition. I had so much fun writing it that I feel like we have a lot more where it came from. We submitted our first ever sitcom pilot after about 10 drafts and it's already been modified again since. There's a big chance that out of 1808 entries it will not be among the 25 shortlisted, although it would be so bloody amazing if we made the shortlist. It is funny, honest.

Ever since completing and submitting the sitcom pilot, we have already been brainstorming and outlining other comedy ideas. I am very excited about our projects and hope to keep it up.

This is definitely the year for comedy with an upcoming sitcom workshop and festival this April: